crowleallotment's Blog

Well, summer is almost over, and i have been considering not only what to grow next season, but also how to store it. That’s maybe looking a bit far ahead, but i figured if i can’t store any particular crop, it’s going to affect how much of it i should grow.

I was looking the other day at a passata maker, a nifty little tool that removes the skin and seeds from tomotoes and produces a nice pulp quickly and easily.

Given that i don’t like tomatoes, you’d think there wasn’t much point growing them, but it’s really only whole tomatoes i don’t like, i think it must be the texture with the seeds in or something….ok, so i’m strange! Once processed, there are a whole raft of things i can make from the resulting gloop…..but i thought at £30 it was a bit steep, so it might have to wait. But then, i struck lucky. As i took a second look at a large quiche dish on a local car boot stall, i noticed something  familiar next to it. A quick conversation with the stall holder, and hey presto, a brand new passata maker in a slightly tatty box for the princely sum of £2.50. Wuhoo!

So, now to research the best tomatoes for that job…..as well as for the ready made family i seem to have acquired by dating a single mother. They, at least, seem to appreciate the delights of whole tomatoes, so i’m looking at the varieties in more detail.

Scouring the internet and some secondhand cookery books for recipes has thrown up some new uses for a whole host of crops that i’ve been experimenting with on a small scale. So now next years planting list seems to be growing.

I’ve also been doing some preserving, making some chutneys from foraged/donated produce, and making some fantastic chilli jelly from a recipe found at the chilliking website. Yummy!

Meanwhile, in the allotment, the strawberry patch, transferred a couple of months ago from large pots in the back garden, is still yielding a few fruit each week. The swede and leeks are really growing well, and might be my first substantial crop from the plot. Beetroot are going well, but i’m not sure they will make it before winter strikes….and i’ve given up on the really lethargic sweet potatoes, they look about the same as when i put them in the ground…..

I’ve given up on the secondhand shed, it is just too rotten at the bottom, so plans are afoot to reduce it in height and convert it to a chicken coop. A new shed is now being sought. And the further i research, the more seems to be needed. Next on the list of things to find room for is a comfrey patch.

Crowle Allotments on a lovely late September morning. Mine plot is the rather forlorn empty patch! Work in progress!

Since my last post, i’ve been snowed under with work, so haven’t had much chance to get the things i wanted done in the allotment.

I bought a pretty tired old shed, and moved the pieces down there, and hopefully tomorrow i will finally get to demonstrate my dubious carpentry skills as i attempt to reconstruct it….

My swedes, beet and leeks are all growing well, but the sweet potatoes are doing even less than i expected, that is to say nothing at all. It’s been cold since i put them in, so i guess it is to be expected…..

On the plus side, i have been able to gather a lot of wild plums from some trees nearby, and have been busy some evenings experimenting with making plum jam. Pretty good, even if i do say so myself.

I’ve not really been into veggie gardening for that long. I started last year growing some basics like french beans, parsnips and spinach. towards the end of last year, i moved to a small bungalow with not much space in the back garden and experimented with “square foot gardening” in 2 raised beds, one 4′ x 6′, the other 3′ x 6′. These went really well, and i got some great crops of radish, carrots, broad beans, runner beans, french beans, beetroot, spring onions etc. Along with some containers for courgettes, gherkins, a rogue marrow that appeared from a courgette seed and some raspberries and strawberries. In the greenhouse i have experimented with a grape vine, some chillies, peppers, a single tomato plant and some tomatillos (mexican tomatoes).

But it was all on too small a scale, i thought. So one day at the local village hardware store, i saw an ad for allotment space in the village and went along to see the secretary on site. They only just got going last year (2010), about 30 plots sized around 15 mtr x 25 mtr, but moderately heavy clay soil. For a start, i was told there were 2 plots free, but a phone call later confirmed that they had been taken that day and i would have to wait. 3 days later, they had another plot available and i snatched it up quick. That was two weeks ago, middle of July. Completely the wrong time of year, but i figured that even if i couldn’t get much planted, i could prepare the ground for next year.

Someone kindly used a rotavator on the plot before i got it, but had only gone to 3 inches deep. So after some frantic searching of the net for advice on what i could and could not do this late in the season, the first job was to split the plot down the centre with a walkway, and allocate about 1/6 of the plot to getting in late crops for this year, and a few to overwinter for an early spring crop…..

I dug to a spades depth to break up the soil (no easy task) and then rotavated it. It was so hard, i could only get the clods broken up to about an inch or so.

In the last few days, i have planted:

20 strawberry plants (15 kindly donated by another allotment holder, Don and 5 stripped from the tub in the garden) I wanted to get these in so the runners would root as soon as possible

5 sweet potato plants (kindly donated by another allotment holder) I know it is really too late in the season for them to grow to maturity, but they were free so no point wasting them. Their growth should provide useful info for next season.

2 rows of swede seeds (already up after 4 days in the ground)

2 rows of beetroot

2 rows of carrots

a row of leeks (kindly donated by another allotment holder, Jenny)

Further plants were to go in today, but it rained heavily overnight and having gone down there this morning, i find a claggy clay that just sticks to the boots…time to put spring cabbage in modules in the greenhouse and wait…..